Did You Hear That? It’s Like a… Clanging?
Imagine you’re an astronaut, strapped into a spacecraft hundreds of miles above Earth. You’re about to make history, but then… clang. A weird noise breaks the silence. And it keeps happening. Clang… clang… clang. Wouldn’t you be at least a little freaked out?
That’s exactly what happened to astronaut Barry Wilmore aboard the Boeing Starliner on Saturday. Now, this wasn’t your typical creak-and-groan spaceship sound. Think more along the lines of a metallic clanging or pulsing. Some folks even said it sounded like a sonar ping.
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Now, I don’t know about you, but a mysterious clanging in space wouldn’t exactly put my mind at ease. Thankfully, Wilmore, ever the professional, calmly reported the sound to the NASA ground team. He even asked them to tweak their comms so he could give them a proper audio sample. (Talk about above-and-beyond customer service, right?)
The good news is, neither Wilmore nor NASA seemed overly panicked. But the fact that they spent time trying to figure out the source of this phantom sound tells you it was more than just your average space-oddity.
So, What Was the Culprit?
Well, after some head-scratching, it seems the culprit was a speaker inside the Starliner. Whew! For a minute there, I was picturing some rogue space debris playing a cosmic game of bumper cars with the spacecraft.
Of course, the big question remains: what caused the speaker to go haywire? Was it a software glitch? A loose wire? Or maybe, just maybe, the Starliner was trying to tell us something… in Morse code?
Okay, maybe not. But hey, in the vast expanse of space, anything’s possible, right?